Drawing on Emerson--and Byron

UNTREATED

My poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements, echoes of the literature of the social sciences and humanities and a steady stream of references to and influences from Baha’i writings, history and teachings. This evening I was reading about the English poet George Byron(1788-1824). I was particularly struck by the fact that all of Byron's poetry is a blending of autobiographical elements and echoes of the literature he had absorbed over the years. And so I felt a certain affinity to Byron for this reason.

His poem Don Juan is considered the most autobiographical of Byron’s works. Almost all of Don Juan is real life either Byron’s or the lives of those whom he knew. Byron started writing Don Juan on July 3rd 1818, eight months after the birth of Baha’u’llah. He continued working on the poem in Italy and on his death in 1824 the poem remained unfinished. Don Juan was a, perhaps the, poem that the working class took to heart in the mid-19th century, so Friedrich Engles informed us in 1844. This poem reached the urban and rural poor and, for many, it was all they read besides the Bible. It is very likely that most of these readers did not read any of Byron's other works. As early as 1819 the work was regarded by the bourgeoisie as filthy and impious, although it was not fully published until 1901. He was regarded by Eliot as having contributed nothing and by Goethe as the greatest genius of his century. -Ron Price with thanks to Galit Avitan, “Publication Histories: Byron’s Don Juan,” Ashes, Sparks and Hypertext, 2000.

I suppose it’s your manic-depression
that first attracted me to your work..;
so often with poetry it’s the man and
not the work which brings one close.

Also, your popularity at the time
of the birth of the greatest soul
to ever draw breath on this planet1
and your autobiographical poetry….

At 36 my malady was finally treated
and yours untreated even as you drew
your last breath in 1824 at Missolonghi.
You made your work for everyone,
although now only a coterie read you.

I, too, try to make my work readable
by everyone but it, too, is read by few.
Perhaps I should call my work sketches,
autobiographical work perfecting my prose.

Your life overshadowed your poetry and
my life is my poetry. Few profoundly feel
your influence, your sincerity and strength
and fewer feel mine whatever I possess.

Your battles in life exaggerated weakness;
your strength was wasted in friction and
you knew your poetry and Keats’ was poor
that neither of you really had the poetic gift.

Emerson said you had a sense of the infinite;
to Shaw you were an energetic genius with
a resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought;
to Eliot you added and discovered nothing---
an assessment made at the start teaching Plan2
and an assessment prophetic in its way for most.

1 Baha’u’llah 1817.
2 1937 in “Contemporary and Critical Opinion,” Byron: Internet Site, 2004.

Ron Price
April 12th 2006
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DETECTING THAT GLEAM OF LIGHT

There is not any ‘Shakespeare himself’. ‘Shakespeare’ is an effect of the text. This is true of any author. The author cannot appear in a text as a subject. The word ‘work’ and ‘author’ are both problematic and enigmatic. To look for the author as some historical person whose state of mind, whose character, we can recapture, is impossible. We cannot recreate and make our own someone else’s experiences and thoughts. But my writing can become more exquisitely subtle and can make others feel their own wealth. I can learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across my mind from within with greater lustre than the light of the firmament.
-Ron Price with appreciation to A.J. Cascardi, Literature and the Question of Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1987 and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”


If we are God’s mystery we may
be completely enigmatic, but still
we strive, as we always will, to
understand ourselves, see things as
they are and ought to be and, like the
motion of the viewless winds, accept
that a myriad mysteries cannot be
revealed in the mystery of words.

All I can do here is attain some delight and
end, after a journey of impulse, in some
clarification and wisdom of life. ‘Tis as if
my human soul was trying to express itself
in verse and in the process carry the reader
on some pleasureable journey of the mind.


Ron Price
26 January 1997